Annotated 23-21
Okay, I can start saying nice things about Phil again here: he encouraged this development and was a good audience for the results.
Sometimes when you’re feeling down about yourself, you get tired of hearing from the people who would say, “Naw, man, you’re great.” Not only do you not believe them, but it feels like they’re invalidating your own feelings. So Frigg’s coarseness is better at pulling E-Merl out of his funk than the more self-conscious nurturing of a Byron, Gravedust, or Syr’Nj would probably be.
If you haven’t guessed yet, Tamara has the same general power as Frigg or Rachel, but she focuses it in a different way. Good thing that “Frigg is afraid of skeletons” strip wasn’t made canon.
It sort of sucks to realize the whole capital-I vs. lowercase-I thing in all-caps fonts, because you can never unsee it when it’s wrong (panel 4). A few are bound to slip through even for the most professional webcomickers.
It actually doesn’t bother me at all. For some reason the singular-I being differentiated still looks right. Probably as a holdover from other fonts.
Obviously THIS is in all-caps.
I like how there’s that pointy toothed guy you talked about earlier in the chapter in panel 5.
Put a little pop corn between his fingers in panel 4 and that’s “Horror Movie Night E-Merl” right there.
With all this innuendo hinting at sexual tension, did you already know that Frigg and E-Merl would end being a couple of sorts?
Not exactly. We knew it was likely these two would form a bond after losing arguably the most important person in both their lives, but we didn’t know the exact shape that bond would take. Actually, we were a pretty long time figuring that out.
I mean…if not someone had something on their minds when they were writing this.
What’s kind of funny about this, and this may seem uncharitable, is it reinforces one of the hurdles Rachel and E-Merl would have faced if they’d developed their relationship further. E-Merl is self involved, he’s very kind and loving, but he is in a battlefield and the woman he loves is out of sight, and he’s thinking about his feelings. It’s not even that he’s too focused on the needs of the moment. The guy’s back to back with an ally fighting against 13 capable fighters, and he’s still got an inner monologue going about his feelings. Rachel would never be able to feed the self love he needs, but because of her nature she would try, and he would rely on her too much for validation, while never really being satisfied. Because he still thinks so poorly of himself.
Frigg’s general projection of confidence grants her the ability to rudely buoy up someone’s emotions at little cost. She can put out what others need without it costing her, because she isn’t investing herself in their emotional well-being, she’s just pointing out what seems obvious to her, good or bad. It wouldn’t occur to her to try to fill E-merl’s emotional void (“hur hur”) because that’s not her fucking job. This means that while she does give him sort of tough love validation, he can’t completely rely on it, and he’s got to do the emotional labor, while she shakes her head and laughs at him.
At least that’s my read on their dynamic.
Good stuff!
That bit about Frigg is correct but remembering how Rachel “taught” Frigg, I think she’s well capable of challenging someone’s view of themselves. She’s more a teacher type than a nurse type. I think if she and E-Merl had ended up, he totally *would* have leaned on her emotionally, but there’s also a chance she would eventually taught him a lesson in return.
The closer Rachel comes to her end, the higher my opinion of her, even in the first read-through while still believing everyone was gonna be alright in the end.
Once again the art in this battle is great, very good use of space, and positioning our view so we get the spacial relationships at play. Panel four is hilarious. Glowy spine is cool too.